A Poem For Sunday

“Glutton” by Frank Bidart:

Ropes of my dead

Grandmother’s unreproducible

sausage, curing for weeks

on the front porch. My mother,

thoroughly

Americanized, found them

vaguely shameful.

Now though I

taste and taste

I can’t find that

taste I so loved as a kid.

Each thing generates the Idea

of itself, the perfect thing that it

is, of course, not—

once, a pear so breathtakingly

succulent I couldn’t

breathe.  I take back that

“of course.”

It’s got to be out there again,–

. . . I have tasted it.

(From Metaphysical Dog by Frank Bidart © 2013 by Frank Bidart. Reprinted by kind permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Photo by Tim Samoff)